Electronic mail and the Internet have become increasingly common ways of delivering information to users throughout the world. Due to the international nature of the Internet, information providers have experienced a growing need to provide content that is interesting and understandable to diverse users from various parts of the world. For example, French users are likely to be more interested in information relating to France than in information relating to the United States. Also, they generally prefer information to be presented in French rather than English. The process of providing customized content that is both understandable and interesting to users from diverse locations is known as localization.
Conventionally, localization involves predicting locations from which users are likely to originate and creating electronic documents, such as electronic mail messages and HTML pages, for each such location. For example, a set of documents is typically created for each country for which localization is desired. Multilingual countries, such as Canada, might have two or more associated sets of documents.
Maintaining multilingual content presents a number of challenges. First, it is desirable to use server resources efficiently by supporting multiple languages from each server. This server should also readily support the addition of new languages. Another challenge is the need to preserve the operability of the code underlying the content, e.g., HTML formatting. Because localization is often performed by parties other than the content provider, localized versions of content may not be coordinated with each other. As a result, integrating several localized versions of content can suffer from compatibility problems or other impediments.
This challenge is further complicated by the variety of browsers and browser versions employed by various users around the world. Because browsers have individual nuances and differences in character set support (e.g., DBCS, UTF-8, Unicode), support for several different types of browsers is desirable.
With respect to electronic mail, most conventional Web systems use a plain text electronic mail format that does not adequately provide rich-text features, such as user-selectable fonts and colors. Further, the fixed portion of electronic mail messages is typically embedded in the code, making localization to other languages and locations difficult.